Submitted by Jeff Buster on Fri, 01/25/2008 - 09:43.
A recent response by J. Murray, an energetic contributor to Brewed Fresh Daily - struck me as fatalistic, inhumane, insensitive, and blindly lacking in informed self-interest. Reading J large, helping our neighbor is to interfere with the inevitable, efficient, scientific cycle of capitalism. I don’t believe that J’s “Man” is slave to any economic model - provided he thinks and acts.
How should we act (and act to preserve our own self interests)?
I’m not prone to quote religious text, but Samaritans aren’t just religious, because for their practicality they may be labeled anti-deist as well.
It is practical to preserve life - both directly, and through preserving the environment.
The photos above are of a recently installed suicide prevention fence on a bridge over the Don Valley in Toronto, Canada.
J. - do you think the government money spent to build this fence was well spent? Or should we not interfere with “Mans” undeniable right to kill himself?
Does society save money overall when it supports those who have made “bad” decisions, or does society save money by letting those who made “bad” decisions jump off the bridge?
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AuthentiCITY
I find it ironic, that buzzwords often embed our most primitive instincts. People flee to the country to avoid society and then crave the very agora they find repellent and recreate some phony facsimile of it, a la Crocker Park.
Yes--J. Murray--decay and migration are part of nature, so is the tragedy of the commons. Nature abhors a vaccuum. Everything old is new again...survival of the fittest means that us CITY vermin will survive...
So, let's learn to flock and herd ourselves before it is too late. The American Eagle is coming back home to roost along the Cuyahoga River and beavers are building their home at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. There is still hope. Let's reCREATE.
Lord of the flies
Clearly too many people took the wrong messages from Lord of the Flies... those are the ones who wished Piggy got his... society hadn't intervened. But survival of the ifttest isn't proving to be very pretty for anyone. There is hope, and it is that better people become involved in the political process in America.
Disrupt IT
Fools
A lot of people fool themselves into thinking that they live at the top of the food chain. Every living thing needs food, clean water and clean air. Food chains, without balance, collapse. ECOlogy, ECOnomics.. ECO. Human beings need liveable cities--with food production.